NOAA aims to promote global environmental management practices which will help conserve and manage USA marine and coastal resources, and to monitor/predict changes in the environment in order to enhance sustainable economic opportunities. Maintains archives of data relating on the ocean, land, climate and atmosphere.
Information services include:
(a) WWW/gopher server: information on and links to programme elements, including the National Ocean Service (NOS)
(b) Environmental Information Services: unit responsible for supporting access to information held
(c) National Environmental Satellite Data and Information Service (NESDIS): coordination of access to USA data
(d) Archives of data, held by the National Climate Data Centre (NCDC), National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC), National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC). See separate entries for these. Maintains a union catalogue of datasets held by these centres (searchable via NOAA WWW/gopher/telnet).
(e) Global Change Data and Information Services (GCDIS): supporting access data collected by US Federal Agencies. See separate entry